After all of THAT…after Hillary and the media and liberals…and the GOP establishment threw everything they had at Donald…

He is tied with Hillary (within statistical margin of error) in every major credible national poll out in the past few days. Pick your poll: Zogby, Rasmussen, LA Times/USC, Bloomberg, they all say he’s down 1 or 2 points with likely voters- which is tied. In the latest LA times/USC poll he’s down less than one point.

And we all know 5% to 10% of voters won’t admit they support Trump. Why would they after the three weeks of disaster I just described?

So that means he’s actually AHEAD by 3 to 5 points.

Hillary is like a NFL team ahead by 14 in the 3rd quarter…and the coach, players and fans all know it’s not enough. They can feel it. Disaster is coming. They are ahead by 14…and they just know they are dead.

If Hillary isn’t ahead by 15 to 20 points right now…at this absolute low point of Trump’s campaign…the deep, deep valley…Hillary is the one in deep trouble.

Her peak is actually the valley. Her fans and the mainstream media just don’t understand that yet. This is the high water mark of her campaign. It will never get better than this. And she’s tied, hanging on by her fingernails.

She won’t make it to the November 8th finish line. She is DOA (I mean politically, of course).

Even worse…

She knows any day between now and November 8th…Julian Assange and Wikileaks will drop a bombshell that will destroy her presidential run, political career and legacy all in one. She knows what’s coming, because she knows what’s in those emails. If Wikileaks has what Hillary thinks they have, her future involves the “Big House,” not the White House.

Because Wikileaks clearly has her 32,000 deleted emails. Secret emails that detail her crimes against the American people.

No wonder Hillary’s sick…no wonder she has “health issues”…no wonder she has trouble standing up behind a podium…or sitting on a couch without being propped up by large pillows…or walking up stairs…stress will kill you!

“I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different future,” Trump said Tuesday night in a sobering policy address near Milwaukee. “The Democratic party has failed and betrayed the African-American community. Democratic crime policies, education policies, and economic policies have produced only more crime, more broken homes, and more poverty.”

Trump then hammered his opponent.

“Hillary Clinton–backed policies are responsible for the problems in the inner cities today, and a vote for her is a vote for another generation of poverty, high crime, and lost opportunities,” Trump declared. “We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes, not as individual human beings worthy of a better future. She doesn’t care at all about the hurting people of this country, or the suffering she has caused them.”

Trump noted who lords over most poor black neighborhoods.

“The Democratic party has run nearly every inner city in this country for 50 years, and run them into financial ruin,” Trump explained. “They’ve ruined the schools. They’ve driven out the jobs. They’ve tolerated a level of crime no American should consider acceptable.”

Johnson said Trump’s speech targeted what “Democrats have done to the black community over the last sixty years,” and laid things out more plainly, and boldly, than previous Republicans have dared to attempt.

“To have it laid out, to have it addressed, to not have it skirted over, to not have it bathed in welfare talk, and poverty talk, but actually to have it, to inspire black people that America is your country, and you deserve to have the greatness and richness thereof in it – I was over the moon last night! Congratulations, Donald Trump! Thank you!” she declared.

SiriusXM host Matt Boyle pointed out that polls show Trump faring very poorly with black voters, but Johnson was confident his speech in Wisconsin would help him turn those numbers around, and even meet his goal of drawing a larger percentage of the black vote than previous GOP candidates.

“The emphasis is on the American people, and for once, you have a Republican candidate that went above and beyond to make sure that black people feel like they are included in that America,” she said. “You don’t have to convince black people that having money is better than being poor. You don’t have to convince them of that. All you have to do is inspire them, and they will do the rest.”

“And that is what Hillary needs to be scared to death of,” she continued. “You have a generation of young blacks that are inspired to take over the world, and now we have a Republican candidate that’s saying, not only will I be your voice, not only will I stand with you, but I will win. And that is something that the black community has not had, since they have let these progressives be in control of our cities. Just the thought of having a real fight in the inner cities of America, with a Republican candidate that gives a damn — Hillary Clinton better be shakin’ in her boots!”

Someone on CNN said that if Trump were serious about wanting the black vote, he would address groups like the NAACP. That was in fact a big mistake that even President Reagan made.

Blacks voters are not the property of the NAACP, and they need to be addressed directly as individuals, over the heads of special-interest organizations that have led blacks into the blind alley of being a voting bloc that has been taken for granted far too long.

Clarke said, “Well, first of all, the social order in Milwaukee totally collapsed on Saturday night. When the social order collapses, tribal behavior takes over. When tribal behavior takes over, the law of the jungle replaces the rule of law and that’s why you end up with what you saw. Last night was a little better. Not good enough for me. I won’t be satisfied until these creeps crawl back into their holes so the good law abiding people who live in the Milwaukee ghettos can return to at least a calm quality of life.”

Trump should take this message to black churches, civic groups, and business associations and respectfully ask black Americans for their votes. All else being equal, if he convinces 15 percent of them, this election becomes a squeaker. If he scores 20 percent of black ballots, Trump trumps Clinton.

Nervous whites who see Trump meet black voters would find such images a comforting contrast to charges that Trump is a racist. Some will be sufficiently reassured and support him.

And Trump’s unyielding conservative critics — including Hillary Clinton’s enablers in the Never Trump crowd — might reevaluate a GOP nominee who finally expressed some “very difficult truths,” in Trump’s words, that other Republican standard bearers understood but were not brave enough to utter.

But since the conventions, and fueled by his own missteps, Trump has been hit by a tsunami of negative coverage, all but swamping the reporting on Hillary Clinton. Liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald recently told Slate that “the U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”—and, given his views, he has no problem with that.

Now comes Jim Rutenberg, in his first season as media columnist for theNew York Times. He’s a good reporter and I give him credit for trying to openly grapple with this bizarre situation.

But Rutenberg is, in my view, trying to defend the indefensible:

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”

Yet normal standards, says Rutenberg, may not apply.

By “closer to being oppositional,” he means openly siding against Trump and thereby helping Clinton. And that’s precisely the kind of thing that erodes our already damaged credibility. If a reporter believes Trump is a threat to America, he or she should go into the opinion business, or quit the media world and work against him. You can’t maintain the fig leaf of neutral reporting and favor one side.

Rutenberg acknowledges that “balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy. For the primaries and caucuses, the imbalance played to his advantage, captured by the killer statistic of the season: His nearly $2 billion in free media was more than six times as much as that of his closest Republican rival.”

Let me list all the many shocking stories NBC News should be mentioning, if not covering extensively. Instead they won’t even admit these news stories and scandals exist.

Hillary’s hacked emails may have led to the discovery and execution of an Iranian scientist helping the U.S. His name was prominently mentioned in Hillary’s hacked emails that undoubtedly ended up in the hands of our enemies. Yet we hear not a word from NBC News.

Hillary’s hacked emails may have led to the discovery and murder of Libya Ambassador Chris Stevens and those 3 American heroes at Benghazi. Hillary’s hacked emails gave up his location.

It appears I’m not the only one to think so. Hillary is now being sued by the parents of the dead Benghazi heroes for this gross negligence. Yet we hear not a word from NBC News. They did plenty of reporting about the one Muslim gold star father, but virtually zero coverage of the parents of dead Benghazi heroes. Donald had harsh words. Hillary lied to the parents’ faces with their children’s caskets lying nearby. Her actions may have led to their deaths. Still NBC says nothing.

Hillary’s hacked emails show the Clinton Foundation is one big extortion racket that involved “pay for play.” Those who donated to the infamous Clinton Foundation immediately got high-level access and contracts from Hillary’s State Department. Folks this is treason – pure and simple. Yet we hear not a word from NBC News.

Can you even imagine if Donald Trump served in a presidential cabinet and sold out his access and government contracts in return for donations to his foundation? It would be the biggest news story in America. The FBI would be leading him away in handcuffs right now.

My local newspaper, the Sonoma County Press-Democrat, is so clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton that I no longer take pleasure in my morning read. Trump’s acceptance speech, for example, was covered on the front page with two stories: on the left a straight, albeit somewhat judgmental, account of the speech, and on the right a “fact check” that disputed every point made by the GOP nominee. Clinton’s speech was covered with three front page stories, with headlines describing her nomination as “historic,” “inspiring” and “trailblazing.” A relatively mild fact-checking piece was relegated to the back pages.

This transparent bias is a national phenomenon, infecting both print and television media to such an extent that it has become almost impossible to separate coverage of the Trump campaign from attempts to tear it down. The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they’ve lost the ability to assess events rationally.

To take a recent example: Trump said at a news conference that he hoped the Russians — who are accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers — would release the 30,000 emails previously erased by Clinton’s staff. The DNC went ballistic, claiming that Trump had asked the Russians to commit “espionage” against the United States. Aside from the fact that Trump was obviously joking, Clinton claims those emails, which were on her unauthorized server during her tenure as secretary of State, were about her yoga lessons and personal notes to her husband — so how would revealing them endanger “national security”? Yet the media reported this accusation uncritically. A New York Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Ashley Parker, ostensibly reporting Trump’s contention that he spoke in jest, nonetheless averred that “the Republican nominee basically urged Russia, an adversary, to conduct cyber-espionage against a former secretary of state.” Would it be a stretch to conclude from this description that the New York Times is a Trump adversary?

The DNC emails, published by Wikileaks, reveal a stunning level of collaboration between important media outlets and the Democrats. Former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sought to silence NBC’s Mika Brzezinski, who had found fault with the DNC’s role in the primaries. The emails have headings like “This must stop.” Incredibly, NBC’s Chuck Todd agreed to act as a go-between, even arranging a call between Wasserman Schultz and Brzezinski. Which raises the question: Why was a major media figure taking his marching orders from the Democratic party chair — and how did this affect his network’s coverage of the Trump campaign?

The DNC emails also show that Politicoreporter Kenneth Vogel sent his copy for a story on Clinton’s fundraising operation to the DNC’s national press secretary, Mark Paustenbach, prior to publication. Politico has since apologized, but Vogel has his defenders. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said Vogel’s “prepublication generosity” was meant to give “the people you’re writing about … the opportunity to rebut all relevant claims in a story.” One wonders if the Washington Post does this for the Trump campaign. Somehow I doubt it.

Since last summer, Politico has been vehemently anti-Trump, and it’s only getting more extreme. It’s run several stories linking Trump to Vladimir Putin: “Why Russia is Rejoicing Over Trump,” “GOP Gobsmacked by Trump’s Warm Embrace of Putin,” “Donald Trump Heaps More Praise on Vladimir Putin” — and dozens of similar articles. The gist of these pieces is that Trump’s stated desire to “get along with Putin,” and his comments on the costs imposed by our membership in NATO, mean that Trump is essentially an agent of a foreign power. A recent article by Katie Glueck on Trump’s hacking joke said that Trump “appeared to align himself with Russia over his Democratic opponent” — as if he were a kind of Manchurian candidate.

Of course, Politico is not alone in what was once called red-baiting. TheAtlantic also weighed in with Jeffrey Goldberg’s “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin,” and a Franklin Foer story in Slate was headlined “The Real Winner of the RNC: Vladimir Putin.” This coverage smacks of the sort of McCarthyism that we haven’t seen in this country since the most frigid years of the Cold War.

Any objective observer of the news media’s treatment of Trump can certainly conclude that reporters are taking a side in this election — and they don’t have to be wearing a button that says “I’m with her” for this to be readily apparent. The irony is that the media’s Trump bashing may wind up having the exact opposite of its intended effect.

Polls shows that journalism is one of the least respected professions in the country, and with Trump calling out media organizations for their bias, widespread slanted reporting is bound to reinforce this point — and to backfire. Trump’s campaign is throwing down the gauntlet to the political class. If journalists are seen as the mouthpiece of that class, they may soon find themselves covering Trump’s inauguration.

During the Democratic National Convention last week CNN and the New York Times pushed out the lie that at a presser Trump had invited Russia to somehow hack Hillary Clinton’s emails which are far as anyone can tell no longer exist. The party of sedition and treason went nuts calling Trump a traitor. In reality all Trump did was offer a quip to reporters, urging Russia or any other governments that may have Clinton’s mountain of missing emails in their possession to return them to the United States. Nor was Trump’s statement tantamount to asking Russia to interfere in U.S. elections.

The media left out the fact that Clinton is much closer to Russia than Trump is and that that nation’s government has compromised her. She even cut bad deals with that country to hand over a big chunk of American uranium to the Kremlin.

Journalists are engaging in all this mischief because they are acutely aware that if Trump can somehow penetrate the massive propaganda force-field the mainstream media has erected around his campaign, the party is over. The thinking among the media and the Left – but I repeat myself – is that if they can keep strategically placing nasty little booby-traps in the undisciplined candidate’s path they can keep him off-message and floundering long enough to get would-be federal inmate Hillary Clinton across the finish line Nov. 8.

If he can reach voters with his tremendously popular message of law and order, immigration enforcement and border security, and mostly pro-growth economic policies, he wins – convincingly – in a year of political populism and anti-establishment anger.

If Trump focuses on one issue, specifically, how truly rotten and anemic the Obama-Clinton economy is, he probably wins.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger said Clinton, whose class warfare-dominated platform calls for far-reaching, even punitive, tax hikes all over the place ought to doom her candidacy. “Trump should be killing her on that point,” he said on the most recent installment of the “John Batchelor Show.”

Despite polling showing Clinton ahead of Trump, seasoned political handicappers know that Hillary’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even gung-ho leftists Michael Moore and Cenk Uygur think Clinton, the ultimate political insider, is such a lousy candidate that she’s destined to take a dive on Nov. 8.

Reporters are doing these terrible things because they are terrified that there will be no third Obama term and that Americans will have to wait a few more years for a president who has a uterus. And worst of all in their view, is the possibility that America just might have a future with Trump in the Oval Office. That is unacceptable to these ink-stained wretches and blow-dried talking heads who insist on influencing the news instead of merely reporting it.

The media is also trying to depict the Trump campaign as in a state of growing disarray, even though Democrats are experiencing unprecedented political meltdowns.

Top staffers were liquidated in a Bolshevik-style purge at the Democratic National Committee after leaked emails showed top Democrats engaged in unethical behavior, including waging war against second-place primary finisher Bernie Sanders.

Although recent polls show Clinton’s lead over Trump growing in the wake of the businessman’s messaging problems, the admittedly subjective anecdotal evidence on the ground suggests Trump is doing fine. His fundraising has dramatically picked up.

Trump continues receiving rock star treatment at rallies around the country such as those held this week in Portland, Me., and Daytona Beach and Jacksonville, Fla. Trump speaks to overflow crowds while Clinton has great difficulty filling more modestly sized venues. There is no passion for Hillary. There are plenty of people who feel they have to vote for her because having a president with a uterus would be a world-historic moment.

But reporters still aren’t asking the Clinton campaign about the candidate’s fall in December 2012 in which she suffered brain damage. Her coughing fits at the podium, strange facial expressions at the Democrat convention as celebratory balloons were falling, and jerky body movements also don’t inspire confidence in her ability to physically endure the rigors of the presidency. Nor does the fact that she hasn’t held a press conference in 244 days. She is everywhere on TV and yet she says next to nothing of substance. She is hiding in plain sight and the media is protecting her from having to answer inconvenient questions.

“You know I have laid out all of these plans and I’m well aware that I have been sometimes made fun of for putting out these plans, about the economy and education and criminal justice reform and health care and gun safety measures and all the rest of it, but I do have this old fashioned idea, when you run for president, you ought to tell the voters of America what you would do as president.” (RELATED: Comey Confirms Hillary Clinton Lied To The Public About Her Emails [VIDEO])

“So, I am going to keep telling you what I would do because I want you to hold me accountable, press and citizens alike,” Clinton said. “Because the stakes are as high as they’ve ever been in our lifetimes. And we all have to do our part. So thank you for what you do every day. Thank you for inviting me to address you today.”

But if the Republicans lose, it can be much more serious for them and for the country. If Hillary Clinton inspires distrust, Donald Trump inspires disgust, even among many Republicans. If Trump goes down to defeat, he could taint the whole Republican party, costing them the Senate now and future elections later.

Even if Trump disappears from the political scene after defeat, his reckless, ugly and childish words will live on in innumerable videos that can be used for years to come, to taint Republicans as the party that chose such a shallow egomaniac as its candidate for President of the United States.

A President Trump could of course create a longer-lasting stigma. However, he might possibly be sobered up by the responsibilities of the presidency. But someone who has not matured in 70 years seems unlikely to grow up in the next 4 years.

Voting for an out of control egomaniac like Donald Trump would be like playing Russian roulette with the future of this country. Voting for someone with a track record like Hillary Clinton’s is like putting a shotgun to your head and pulling the trigger. And not voting at all is just giving up.

“He’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up,” Clint Eastwood said in an interview with Esquire. “That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells.”

Eastwood specifically cited Trump’s comments criticizing a judge who was born to Mexican parents, but indicated he was tired of the media fueled controversy

“He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides,” he said “But everybody —the press and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, well, that’s racist,’ and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.”

(…)

“I’d have to go for Trump … you know, ’cause she’s declared that she’s gonna follow in Obama’s footsteps,” he said, calling Clinton “a tough voice to listen to for four years.”

Eastwood criticized political figures who were using their position to make money, citing “too much funny business on both sides of the aisle.”

“She’s made a lot of dough out of being a politician,” he said, referring to Clinton.

Mr. Cuomo asked what Mr. Trump would say if a translator said to him: “‘The pope believes that capitalism can be a real avenue to greed. It can be really toxic and corrupt.’ And he’s shaking his finger at you when he says it. What do you say in response to the pope?”

“I’d say ISIS wants to get you,” Mr. Trump said. “You know that ISIS wants to go in and take over the Vatican? You have heard that — you know, that’s a dream of theirs to go into Italy, you do know that.”

First, Trump got most mainstream media news outlets to refocus on the Clinton email controversy with front-page vigor. The controversy never got that much attention when it was being investigated in Congress. Now, it is on the cover of every newspaper for the world to read.

Second, Trump’s comments stole the headlines from the Democrats’ vice presidential rollout and President Obama’s speech on day three of the convention. No one is talking about Tim Kaine, certainly, and Barack Obama’s oversized ego must be smarting from the lack of attention. Everyone is talking about Trump.

Third, he took another dig at the mainstream media, and they are printing his criticism everywhere. Re-quoting the brilliant line, “…I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” was sarcasm at its finest. Everyone knows that the press will never print anything negative about a Democrat unless forced to do so, or unless they’re trying to raise a friendly warning flag about changing course. Consequently, they will definitely not be “rewarded.” Republicans and conservative-leaning Independents should be laughing at this line.

Fourth, Trump reinforced the rigged system narrative. All week long, Bernie Sanders supporters and the DNC have been arguing over the obviously rigged system that favored Hillary Clinton. Now Trump has expounded upon that narrative. He knows you cannot steal deleted emails. After all, how could the Russians hack that to which FBI Director James Comey testified was destroyed beyond any possible recovery? Unless, of course, the FBI was lying…

Trump watered the mental seed that is growing in everyone who believes the system is rigged. If those emails do not exist, why worry about hacking? If they do exist, why did the FBI not produce them?

Fifth, Trump reopened a festering wound in the psyche of the Democratic voter: what if those emails do contain something that can sink Hillary in November? No doubt, a significant portion of the “outrage” over Trump’s alleged hacking comments was really just preemptive damage control. If Hillary Clinton did something so egregious that one of those emails contained more than yoga schedules, then the DNC will have a hard time distracting the American public from that news story. The only thing that might work is faux indignation over the possibility that a foreign government is intervening in our affairs.

The sixth and most brilliant Trump achievement was how hard the media bit. The accusations levied against Trump were over-the-top. From Russian collusion to treason, the words he actually said reached none of the hype the media reported them to be. Now, normal people who do not live in New York City, Washington, D.C. or Los Angeles are reading those words and thinking “wow, that comment is meaningless… hardly treasonous… the media really has it in for this guy.”

The level of media bias in reporting the Democratic National Convention is as high as I have ever seen outside of North Korea and the old Soviet bloc. The GOP convention was declared a disaster many times during its four-day run, but the DNC, reeling from revelations of the rigging of the primary contests, is getting far more benign descriptors, as the media avert their eyes from unpleasant realities.

Among the most unpleasant realities for Democrats and the media is the anger of Bernie supporters now that it is clear the campaign into which they threw their hearts and souls was fixed all along. Somehow, that anger must be minimized, trivialized, and eventually extinguished if Donald Trump is to be stopped. And in the eyes of the media, that threat is so overwhelming that no restraints whatsoever are justified in making the case against him as propagandists rather than honest observers and reporters.

So the focus last night at the DNC was “history being made,” (no Y chromosomes at the top of the ticket) and a soft focus look at Hillary’s record as a left wing activist using children as a front for demanding leftist policies and selected aspects of her personal relationship with Bill Clinton, the most popular living Democrat (if you ask Democrats).

A crew from The Daily Show — which plunged in the ratings after Trevor Noah took over as host— set up outside the event and approached people as they left the party, asking them for interviews.

At 12:30 a.m., Pollak was leaving the party when The Daily Show approached. “I was on the phone anyway,” Pollak recalled, “so I ignored them, but then I saw them pulling someone aside, so I stopped to watch.” The Breitbart senior editor-at-large ended his call, and turned on his video camera.

The Daily Show didn’t like that. Their attempt to stop Pollak wasn’t funny, and included physical intimidation and a blatant disregard for the First Amendment.

“I wanted to shoot raw footage of their interview with a young, gay conservative, because I wanted to compare it to their final cut and see whether they had been fair to him,” Pollak recalled.

“I didn’t want this person to be humiliated merely for being gay and having the ‘wrong’ political views,” Pollak added.

“They told me not to film, then they told me —incorrectly — that I couldn’t film them, and then one of their reporters pushed me. Finally, they gave up, packed up their cameras and ran away.”

(…)

The actions of the thugs from The Daily Show are shocking, and they rip the lid off the real purpose off the show: political propaganda disguised as entertainment. They weren’t trying to hide their “jokes” but were trying to keep their dwindling viewership from seeing how they make the sausage.

It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with more neurotic tics than a flea-bitten Woody Allen and turned him into the voice of liberalism. Stewart’s nervous smirk and his passive aggressive mockery became the zeitgeist of urban Democrats nervously responding to Bush’s popularity and the rise of American patriotism after September 11.

The Democratic Party was out of ideas. The politicians who would become some of Bush’s most fevered critics were still following the president’s cues. A newly serious America was confronting a world war.

Stewart’s disingenuousness, veering from ironic detachment to self-righteous hectoring, undermined real sincerity with fake sincerity. The Daily Show’s audience of hipster yuppies cheered their newfound faith in sincere cynicism while the calculated ironic distance of his comedy kept him safe from critics. Even while he attacked the media’s dishonesty, his own routine was the most dishonest of them all.

His fake news was real news, biased and spun with punch lines. It was fake news that was real and just as fake as the rest of the news. The truth was that the lie was still a lie.

What Stewart offered a party dragged down by a morose Gore and Kerry was the promise of cool. Their former figurehead had started out playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show only to decay into a bloated red-faced mess. With towers burning and wars rising, Stewart was to be their bridge to a cooler and younger 21st century that an aging Democratic Party no longer seemed able to grapple with.

Jon Stewart didn’t actually have cool, but he could offer it up inversely by way of mockery. Like a school paper’s drama critic, he might not be cool, but by railing against others, he could deny coolness to them.

(…)

What Stewart offered Democrats was an evasive viewpoint without accountability. And nothing quite appeals to the cowardly instincts of a political hack like being able to take a political position without being held accountable for it. But it was Obama who truly embraced politics without accountability, transforming every issue into a joke or referencing it back to his own biography.

While he may have come out on the stage with a unique personal story, what kept Obama competitive was his skill at refracting everything through layers of irony and self-awareness. His approach was to borrow Stewart’s own routine without any of its ambiguity. Stewart’s pretense of triangulation became Obama’s obsession with turning his radical left-wing politics into an imaginary middle ground.

Stewart and Obama had come out of a political movement trying to respond to September 11 without having the first idea how to do so. Stewart’s comedy paved the way for minimizing the threat while inflating the absurdity of those trying to fight it. It is an approach that Obama continues to embrace.

(…)

Generation X cynicism fused with millennial brand awareness to create a political monster who might not be able to lie to the people all the time, but who cynically made the existence of his lies irrelevant.

Stewart’s Daily Show had offered an antidote to the Bush era of patriotism, sincerity and decency. Its antidote was passive aggressive ridicule and political satire as sincerity. After the Bush era ended, Stewart and his fellow comedians had little left to do except take on the job of defending Obama, while occasionally critiquing him. They had become the official court jesters of the Democratic Party.

Stewart: “Both sides are engaging in aerial bombardment, but one side appears to be bomb-better-at it. (Studio laughter at the wordplay.) Most Hamas rockets are neutralized by Israel’s Iron Dome technology, and Israeli citizens can even now download a warning app. (Cut to clip of Israel’s US ambassador Ron Dermer explaining how Israelis can know where and when they’re being attacked.) So Israelis seem to have a high-tech, smart-phone alert system.”

Let me see if I understand the point he’s making here: Having falsely implied that Israel is as keen on killing as Hamas is, Stewart now seems to be criticizing Israel for not being as vulnerable as Hamas would like it to be to those Hamas rockets that are sent to kill us. He seems to be bashing us for having those tech smarts. It’s a bad thing that we developed a unique, astonishing Iron Dome missile defense system, without which hundreds of us would be dead? It’s a bad thing that we developed an app to warn us that the rockets designed to kill our citizens are heading this way?

Stewart: “How are the Gazans notified? (Cut to a clip explaining that Israel carries out “a small mortar explosion” on the roof of a building that is to be bombed “which serves as an Israeli warning of an upcoming airstrike.” Back to Stewart.) “Hmmm. So the Israeli military warns Gaza residents of imminent bombing (pause for comedic effect), with a smaller warning bombing! (Laughter). An amuse-boom, if you will.” (Studio laughter, clapping, cheering.)

What’s my problem with that bit (once I’ve registered the witty play on amuse-bouche). Oh, where to start? Stewart fails to explain which buildings in Gaza are being targeted: This is not the mirror image of Hamas’s arbitrary rocket attacks on any and every Israeli target. These are Israeli airstrikes on Gaza homes where Israel says terror chiefs live, where weaponry is stored, from where rockets are fired.

Furthermore, whereas Hamas, out to kill, does not generally warn Israel of imminent rocket attacks (thus rendering every missile fired at Israel from Gaza “a crime against humanity,” according to the Palestinian Authority’s own UN representative), Israel, trying not to kill noncombatants, fires that warning mortar shell to alert civilians — even though it knows this is more than likely to lead to the terrorist fleeing. Would Stewart rather Israel not warn Gazans that, in its efforts to prevent rocket fire on its civilians, it is about to strike back?

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease.

But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama’s remedies proved worse than the original illness.

Obama gave his first presidential interview to Al Arabiya, noting that he has Muslims in his family. He implicitly blamed America’s strained relations with many Middle Eastern countries on his supposedly insensitive predecessor, George W. Bush.

The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.

Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word “terrorism,” was airbrushed from the new administration’s vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster” and “workplace violence.”

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.

Yet Obama’s outreach was still interpreted by Islamists as guilt and weakness to be exploited rather than magnanimity to be reciprocated. Terrorist attacks increased. Obama blamed them on a lack of gun control or generic “violent extremism.”

(…)

Radical Islam never had legitimate grievances against the West. America and Europe had welcomed in Muslim immigrants — even as Christians were persecuted and driven out of the Middle East.

Billions of dollars in American aid still flows to Islamic countries. The U.S. spent untold blood and treasure freeing Kuwait and later the Shiites of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. America tried to save Afghanistan from the Soviets and later from the Taliban.

For over a half-century, the West paid jacked-up prices for OPEC oil — even as the U.S. Navy protected Persian Gulf sea lanes to ensure lucrative oil profits for Gulf state monarchies.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the original architects of al-Qaida, were so desperate to find grievances against the West that in their written diatribes they had to invent fantasies of Jews walking in Mecca. In Michael Moore fashion, they laughably whined about America’s lack of campaign finance reform and Western culpability for global warming.

The real problem is that Islamic terrorism feeds off the self-induced failures of the Middle East.

Sunday on Fox News Channel’s breaking news coverage of the shootings in Baton Rouge, LA that has killed 3 officers and injured 3 more, Cleveland police officer and Police Patrolmen’s Association President Steve Loomis said President Barack Obama had “blood on his hands.”

Loomis said, “The president of the Untied States validated a false narrative and the nonsense that Black Lives Matter and the Media are pressing out to the public — validated with his very divisive statements And now we see an escalation.

I New York råbte demonstranter for et par uger siden “What do we want? Dead Cops!”

The head of a law enforcement advocacy group lashed out at President Barack Obama in the wake of the Dallas shootings that left five police officers dead, accused the president of carrying out a “war on cops.”

“I think [the Obama administration] continued appeasements at the federal level with the Department of Justice, their appeasement of violent criminals, their refusal to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter, actively calling for the death of police officers, that type of thing, all the while blaming police for the problems in this country has led directly to the climate that has made Dallas possible,” William Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said in an interview with Fox on Friday morning.

(…)

“It’s a war on cops,” Johnson also said. “And the Obama administration is the Neville Chamberlain of this war.”

“Whenever those of us who are concerned about fairness in the criminal justice system attack police officers, you are doing a disservice to the cause,” Obama said at the Moncola Palace in Madrid.

Obama said that police and activists need to work together and “listen to each other” in order to mobilize real change in America.

The President added that in movements such as Black Lives Matter, there will always be people who make “stupid” or “over generalized” statements, but that a truthful and peaceful tone must be created on both sides for progress.

Og Hillary, der relativerede terrortruslen fra Islamisk Stat et al. med alt, inklusive politibrutalitet kommenterede “White Americans need to do a better job of listening”. Og det, skriver Joel Pollak er “exactly the wrong message. It frames racism as the fundamental problem in American society, and encourages people to interpret events through that lens. It sows seeds of mistrust, when racism had largely been overcome.”

And the answer is that our leaders made a deliberate choice to radicalize our politics, unnecessarily. The racism and mistrust followed, because they are necessary to sustain that radicalism.

The Tea Party arose not because of racism, but because President Barack Obama made clear he was going to push through his agenda regardless of the wishes of the opposition or the constraints of the Constitution, and because voters realized that the Republicans, left to their own devices, were not going to stop him.

The reason Donald Trump exists as a political phenomenon is that there is a sizable constituency of conservatives who are tired of losing to that. They were tired of losing in 2000, too, but Republicans worried at the time about the moderate middle, and so a “compassionate conservative” like George W. Bush was their response.

The left demonized Bush anyway — partly because the 2000 recount convinced them they could, because he was “illegitimate” — and Obama rode that wave to office.

Trump fights back (though his statement about Dallas was remarkably measured, even presidential). The problem is that there is only so much more fighting the country can take. We abuse social media to fantasize about a dystopian America, and in the process we are bringing it about.

[L]et’s go with the Washington Post’s study of police shootings in 2015. The Post found that 990 people, almost all of them men, were shot and killed by law enforcement last year. Before you start calling them victims, however, note that the Post also found that in three-quarters of these incidents, police were defending either themselves or someone else who was, at that moment, under attack. That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person. That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified.

What was the racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015? The largest number, 494, almost exactly half, were white. 258 were black, 172 were Hispanic, and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown. (Interestingly, Asians are rarely shot by police officers.)

The 258 blacks represent 26% of the total. That is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population. Is that prima facie evidence of racism on the part of law enforcement? Of course not. It is common knowledge that blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators. In 2012-2013, the Department of Justice found that blacks were the perpetrators of 24% of all violent crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known (in 7.8% of violent crimes, it was unknown).

So the percentage of blacks fatally shot by police officers (26%) is almost exactly equal to the percentage of blacks committing violent crimes (24%). Indeed, given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.

Liberals might argue that blacks are disproportionately the victims of unjustified shootings by law enforcement, but I have not seen anyone try seriously to make that case. The Post took a pass at supporting the liberal narrative by arguing that “unarmed” blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites. But the Post failed to note that, according to its own data, blacks are much more likely to attack police officers while unarmed. I don’t know why this is, but in general, I think that unarmed people who assault police officers are likely to be high on drugs.

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.

To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies—before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of-wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current. While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense political challenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had.

Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the 1954 Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs.

Yet those most familiar with what was called “the Negro problem” were getting nervous. About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt. More blacks were out of work in 1964 than in 1954. Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964, the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South.

Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.

In the wake of the U.K.’s decision to withdraw from the EU, the anti-Brexit crowd has leaped to explain the vote in stark terms. “The force that has been driving [‘Leave’ voters] is xenophobia,” wrote Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, and at Esquire Charles Pierce explained: “Some of the Oldest and Whitest people on the planet leapt at a chance to vote against the monsters in their heads.” The Guardian’s Joseph Harker mused: “It feels like a ‘First they came for the Poles’ moment.” And blogger Anil Dash managed to squeeze all of these dismissive opinions into a single tweet: “We must learn from brexit: Elderly xenophobes will lie to pollsters to hide their racist views, then vote for destructive policies anyway.”

(…)

Both sides of the Atlantic are dominated by liberal cosmopolitans who are no longer able to acknowledge the validity of any other worldview than their own. The anti-Brexit crowd cannot acknowledge that those who voted to leave may have done so out of legitimate concerns about sovereignty or economic opportunity or security — that is, that they may have drawn rational conclusions and voted accordingly. And President Obama seems incapable of recognizing that there are reasonable, non-bigoted grounds on which to oppose his executive actions — for example, to preserve the principle of separation of powers that is a pillar of the American constitutional order.

Liberal cosmopolitanism, regnant since the end of the Cold War, has bought completely into its own rightness. It is entirely devoted to an increasingly borderless political future carefully managed by technocrats and tempered by “compassion” and “tolerance” — all of which aims at the maximal amount of material prosperity. It sees no other alternative than that we will all, eventually, be “citizens of the world,” and assumes that everyone will be happier that way.

It’s not unreasonable to think otherwise. Anti-EU movements and renewed nationalism in the United States are on the rise precisely because they offer alternatives to this self-assured order. It’s not clear whether a United Kingdom withdrawn from the EU will be better off. But it’s entirely defensible to think that it might be. Likewise, it’s not unreasonable to prefer loyalties rooted in close-knit interactions among people who share a particular space and a particular history. Or to prefer local rule to government outsourced to distant bureaucracies. Or to prefer a richer sense of belonging than interaction in a common market. There are alternatives to a transnational super-state that are not fascism.

‘The shooter targeted a nightclub where people came together to be with friends, to dance and to sing, and to live,’ Obama noted.

‘The place where they were attacked was more than a nightclub, it was a place of solidarity, of empowerment, where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds and to advocate for their civil rights,’ he continued.

The meeting in Baltimore came shortly after Breitbart publicized the Islamic cleric’s orthodox denigration of gays, which was posted on YouTube. It also came after Breitbart asked Obama’s gay political allies to comment on the Islamic cleric’s statements.

“You are a transgressing people,” said the cleric Imam Yaseen Shaikh, who sat on Obama’s left at the meeting. He is the man at the right hand side of the photo above, wearing a white hat. He is a senior leader of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, which Obama choose for the first presidential visit to a mosque in February 2016.

[P]eople who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.

(…)

How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers — sometimes known as “everybody,” with their assumptions being what “everybody knows.”

Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16- to 17-year-old black males was under 10%. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30% for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40% and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50%.

The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can’t move up the ladder if you don’t get on the ladder.

The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today’s dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should — and will — be paid by raising taxes on “the rich.”

Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates.

In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas.

None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think — and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other “leaders” that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.

The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law-enforcement policies. Public-housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public-housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals.

Obama is the divisive excuse maker, as his comments to graduates of Howard University showcased:

“Be confident in your blackness” Obama said in the speech, adding, “That’s a pet peeve of mine, people who’ve been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky, that God may have blessed them. It wasn’t nothing you did.”

I have major issues in Obama’s comments, surely to be overlooked by black liberals, the media, and white Leftist enablers.

To begin, what would the media and other leftists say if George Bush told graduates to “be confident in your whiteness”? I will allow you to ponder that; as for me, no further explanation needed.

In his commencement speech, Obama may have felt the need to remind blacks to be confident, because liberals like reminding blacks that we are less than everybody else. Blacks are taught terms like “institutional racism,” “white privilege,” and many other concepts that essentially say to young blacks that the deck is stacked against them. Black liberals have built-in excuses for failure. The irony of institutional racism is that almost all of the institutional racism originates from bastions of the left; in education, entertainment, and unions, to name a few.

But the next part of the Obama message was most perplexing: “it wasn’t nothing you did” to be successful in life, it was luck.

It seems that Obama is saying that your success is not because of you, your hard work, tenacity, determination, drive, focus, and the many other attributes needed for success. Obama implied that the Howard grads were just lucky.

Of course, there is an element of luck in everything, and there is a saying, “It’s always better to be lucky than good.” But it’s good to be good.

Obama provided a glimpse into this own views of his success, as he feels very lucky to be where he is. He must know that he was not prepared to be president, and that his performance has been dismal. Any credit that Obama gets as president is because of luck. The luck that the media is leftist, and therefore willing to accept failure of a black man, simply because he’s black and a Democrat. Imagine the history of Obama, if he were a white Republican and you will get the picture.

Obama is lucky that black people have not burned down Washington. Because if Obama were “lucky” enough to be a white Republican president, he would be the most despised president by blacks in modern history.

In a time where Obama and other Leftists talk of white privilege, the luckiest man on the planet is Barack Obama, lucky to be considered black, in a world that now despises white.

Trump has consistently disproved conventional wisdom. The old electoral truisms may not apply. Take the clichés about Hispanics. For nearly a decade we’ve been told that the Republicans needed to cultivate this “fastest growing demographic group,” as Obama warned everyone in 2012. The party wise men counseled Republicans to drop the harsh rhetoric about illegal aliens and reach out to the 9% of voters who are Hispanic and allegedly “natural conservatives.” Heeding this advice, Senate Republicans toyed for a while with “comprehensive immigration reform,” which many voters decoded as “amnesty” for lawbreakers stealing their jobs. Yet in most polls, “immigration reform” is consistently low on the list of issues that concern Hispanics.

That didn’t stop some in the party from angering much of the white working class, 36% of the electorate, just to pursue this electoral will-o-the-wisp. About a third of those voters voted Democrat in 2012, but evidence suggests that many are shifting to Trump this year. So Trump speaks to their concerns about ICE’s “catch-and-release” of felons, the hundreds of Americans murdered by illegal aliens, the quality-of-life crimes making many neighborhoods and cities unlivable. Trump promises to put a stop to “sanctuary cities” that blatantly disregard federal law and get away with it. He gets their anger at seeing protestors, like those in Irvine last week, attempting to stop their right to assemble and waving Mexican flags, or the demonstrators in Indiana Monday arming their children with F-bombs to hurl at Trump supporters.

And he especially understands how sick many Republicans and Democrats are of the snotty rhetoric from some leaders and pundits of both parties. From their tony enclaves far from the daily disorder and mayhem caused by our immigration failures, they suggest that such complaints reflect bigotry and xenophobia. So Trump promises to round up the illegals, build a wall on the border, and make Mexico pay for it. And I’ll wager that the pollster’s net doesn’t catch significant numbers of voters who sit at home and shout their approval at the television screen and will pull the lever for Trump come Election Day.

In fact, despite his hard words for illegal aliens, there is growing evidence, much of it anecdotal at this point, that significant numbers of Hispanics and blacks like Trump and may vote for him. Here in the San Joaquin Valley, ground zero for Mexican immigration, one more and more frequently runs into working-class Mexicans who admire Trump for his macho bluster and willingness to slap down politically correct gringos with their superior airs and class snobberies. It’s not just white conservatives who have grown sick and tired of the credentialed class telling them how to live and then demonizing them for disagreeing. No one knows how many Hispanics will vote for Trump, but I’ll wager it will be more than voted for Romney.

But Trump is ignorant and incoherent when it comes to policy, the critics say. Contrary to the commentators cocooned in their social and cultural enclaves, elections are not about policy. The majority of voters don’t carefully study the issues, pore over policy papers, and objectively weigh various proposals in order to arrive at the best choice. They are motivated by their “passions and interests,” as Madison understood. “Interests” are about “property,” or in our time, jobs and the economy. Years of sluggish growth, lower workforce participation, and the investor class waxing fat the whole time have angered a lot of people, including Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Trump’s tirades against free-trade-agreements and China’s currency manipulation speak to these frustrations.

The “passions” we see seething through a Trump rally are the anger at elites of both parties who for years now have talked down to the people, dismissed their legitimate concerns, and sneered at their ignorance, even as they pander to privileged minorities or appease the Democrats. They see criticism of Trump, whether intended or not, as criticism of themselves, yet another patronizing dismissal of their grievances. The backlash against political correctness that Trump has brilliantly exploited is the obvious focus of this anger at politicians who are supposed to be on their side, but who always find excuses to cede the high ground to the other side. Why else would the Senate confirm Loretta Lynch as Attorney General, especially after she told the Judiciary Committee that she viewed Obama’s unconstitutional amnesties as “legal”? Was it because she was eminently qualified, or because she is a black woman?

Some will dispute these assertions as misleading or false, but whether they are true or not is irrelevant. Politics is about perception. How else did a cipher like Barack Obama get elected twice? In 2008 he was perceived to be a racial healer, the smartest president ever, a “no red state, no blue state” unifier, and a brilliant orator. None of these perceptions turned out to be remotely true. The second time it was partly because 81% of voters perceived him to “care about people like me,” while only 18% felt the same about Mitt Romney, one of the most fundamentally decent and kind men ever to run for president. Trump seems to get that perceptions and passions come first, and policy can be figured out later. To a greater or lesser degree, this has pretty much been true in all presidential elections. Trump has simply discarded the decorum that camouflages the truth about political sausage-making.

The history of the looming anti-Muslim backlash that never arrives is instructive. Logically, the original post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash should have been the largest and most ferocious of the various backlashes, and indeed George W. Bush, members of his administration and members of Congress frequently warned Americans not to blame all Muslims for the acts committed by Al-Qaeda.

Even an anti-Israel leftist like Rachel Corrie Award recipient Delinda C. Hanley recognizes that there was no post-9/11 backlash. Writing in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, Hanley gushed: “As a result of the effective campaign undertaken by America’s leaders, non-governmental organizations and the media, a backlash that, in many nations, might have turned into a bloodbath was averted and, indeed, transformed into a celebration of diversity.”

The group known as Human Rights Watch however tells a different tale. It documents in the same era a series of attacks amounting to “a nationwide wave of hate crimes against persons and institutions believed to be Arab or Muslim.” The numbers are notable either for the “ferocity and extent” as HRW puts it, or for the remarkable calm they convey compared to the predicted carnage. For instance the 17-fold increase in anti-Muslim incidents sounds more alarming than the fact that there were 28 such events in 2000 compared with 481 in 2001.

It gets more interesting when one reads that these numbers include behavior ranging from “verbal taunts to employment discrimination to airport profiling to hate crimes.” Since no actual numbers are listed for specific “crimes” one might suspect that there are far more verbal taunts than hate crimes among the 481.

Eighty-two leading Democrats have cosponsored a House Resolution (H.Res. 569) “Condemning violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States”.

The Resolution was introduced in the House of Representatives by Democrat Donald S. Beyer (Virginia) on December 17, 2015 — a mere 15 days after Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook gunned down 14 innocent Americans and wounded 23 in an ISIS-inspired terror attack at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California.

The House Resolution states, “the victims of anti-Muslim hate crimes and rhetoric have faced physical, verbal, and emotional abuse because they were Muslim or believed to be Muslim,” and the House of Representatives “expresses its condolences for the victims of anti-Muslim hate crimes.”

What victims? Of all 1,149 anti-religious hate crimes reported in the United States in 2014, only 16.1% were directed against Muslims, according to the FBI. By contrast, over half of all anti-religious hate crimes were directed against Jews – 56.8%. The fewest, 8.6% of anti-religious hate crimes, were directed against Christians (Protestants and Catholics).

“incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric… The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence. Now obviously, this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric — or, as we saw after 9/11, violence directed at individuals who may not even be Muslims but perceived to be Muslims, and they will suffer just as much — when we see that we will take action.”

Is this House Resolution a prelude to the Attorney General taking that action? Has she seen the potential for someone lifting her “mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric”? And what is “anti-Muslim rhetoric” exactly? Criticizing Islam? Debating Mohammed? Discussing whether ISIS is a true manifestation of Islam? Who decides the definition of what is considered hate speech against Muslims?

Commenting on Saudi Arabia executing an Iranian cleric, Krauthammer said, “I can’t say the Saudi execution of this Shiite cleric was very wise, but they did see it as in their national interest, and I think they are acting fairly desperately. Because they look around and their protector since the 1930s when King Saud met with FDR, and they essentially established this relationship — ‘you supply us oil, we protect you’ — is deeply in jeopardy.”

“They look at the way Obama has abandoned them,” Krauthammer continued. “The nuclear deal is just the culmination of the process. Abandoned them in Syria, abandoning the red line, has done nothing since the signing of the nuclear agreement.”

Krauthammer said the Saudis now worry about encirclement: “Iran has become increasingly aggressive in Syria. In Yemen, which is, remember, is right on the doorstep of Saudi Arabia – it’s not removed the way Syria is – and they see serious encirclement.”

President Obama imagined he could end his second term with an arms-control detente with Iran the way Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet Union. It looks instead that his nuclear deal has inspired Iran toward new military aggression and greater anti-American hostility.

The U.S. and United Nations both say Iran is already violating U.N. resolutions that bar Iran from testing ballistic missiles. Iran has conducted two ballistic-missile tests since the nuclear deal was signed in July, most recently in November. The missiles seem capable of delivering nuclear weapons with relatively small design changes.

The White House initially downplayed the missile tests, but this week it did an odd flip-flop on whether to impose new sanctions in response. On Wednesday it informed Congress that it would target a handful of Iranian companies and individuals responsible for the ballistic-missile program. Then it later said it would delay announcing the sanctions, which are barely a diplomatic rebuke in any case, much less a serious response to an arms-control violation.

Under the nuclear accord, Iran will soon receive $100 billion in unfrozen assets as well as the ability to court investors who are already streaming to Tehran.

(…)

The White House’s media allies are blaming all of this on Iranian “hard-liners” who are supposedly trying to undermine President Rouhani for having negotiated the nuclear deal. Memo to these amateur Tehranologists: The hard-liners run Iran.

Worst of all, the collapse of Saudi oil revenues threatens to exhaust the kingdom’s $700 billion in financial reserves within five years, according to an October estimate by the International Monetary Fund (as I discussed here). The House of Saud relies on subsidies to buy the loyalty of the vast majority of its subjects, and its reduced spending power is the biggest threat to its rule. Last week Riyadh cut subsidies for water, electricity and gasoline. The timing of the executions may be more than coincidence: the royal family’s capacity to buy popular support is eroding just as its regional security policy has fallen apart.

For decades, Riyadh has presented itself as an ally of the West and a force for stability in the region, while providing financial support for Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world. China has been the kingdom’s largest customer as well as a provider of sophisticated weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles. But China also has lost patience with the monarchy’s support for Wahhabi Islamists in China and bordering countries.

According to a senior Chinese analyst, the Saudis are the main source of funding for Islamist madrassas in Western China, where the “East Turkistan Independence Movement” has launched several large-scale terror attacks. Although the Saudi government has reassured Beijing that it does not support the homegrown terrorists, it either can’t or won’t stop some members of the royal family from channeling funds to the local jihadis through informal financial channels. “Our biggest worry in the Middle East isn’t oil—it’s Saudi Arabia,” the analyst said.

China’s Muslims—mainly Uyghurs in Western China who speak a Turkish dialect—are Sunni rather than Shia. Like Russia, China does not have to worry about Iranian agitation among Shia jihadis, and tends to prefer Iran to the Sunni powers. As a matter of form, Beijing wants to appear even-handed in its dealings with Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example in recent contacts between their respective navies. Chinese analysts emphasize that Beijing has sold weapons to both—more in absolute to terms to Iran but more sophisticated weapons to the Saudis.

More pertinent than public diplomacy, though, is where China is buying its oil.

Nonetheless, China’s oil import data show a significant shift away from Saudi Arabia towards Russia and Oman (which China considers part of the Iranian sphere of influence). Russia’s oil exports to China have grown fourfold since 2010 while Saudi exports have stagnated. Given the world oil glut, China can pick and choose its suppliers, and it is hard to avoid the inference that Beijing is buying more from Russia for strategic reasons. According to Russian sources, China also has allowed Russian oil companies to delay physical delivery of oil due under existing contracts, permitting Russia to sell the oil on the open market for cash—the equivalent of a cash loan to Russia.